A recent thesis paper by Alexander Wynn from Wesleyan University entitled “The Goooaaaals of Government: Football as a Political Tool of Fascism and Nazism” draws upon Tor as a bibliographical source and focuses entirely on soccer within Fascist politics and ideology. All three of these articles appear in a 2006 January issue of Sports and Society devoted to Germany. Some of these include “Sport, Cultural Politics and International Relations: England versus Germany” by Brian Stouddart, “The 19 World Cups in Germany: Commonalities, Continuities and Changes” by Udo Merkel and “How Soccer Explains Port-War Germany” by Gregg Gethard.
Several scholarly articles in the journal Sports and Society discussed or at least cited Tor. The growing field of sport’s historians and sociologists has not overlooked Hesse-Lichtenberger’s work. Most of his analysis relies on oral histories, testimonies, interviews and biographies to create a narrative of German soccer designed to “educate English readers.” It goes past the well-known stories of World Cup victories and seeks to explain the German mentality and attitude towards the game from a distinctly domestic perspective. He discusses many key personalities to German soccer such as Walther Bensemann, Fritz Walter, Franz Beckenbauer and Lothär Matthais. It chronicles soccer from its first arrival in the late nineteenth century, through the Weimar government, World War II, the Post War economic boom and into the modern re-unified Democracy. His work gives an entertaining background to the significance of soccer in Germany through many different eras of its past. However this work shows the rich cultural insights that can be drawn from the realm of sports.
Historians have traditionally focused on other aspects of German culture such as Music, Art and Film. Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger’s narrative history Tor: The Story of German Football is one of very few books dedicated to German soccer in the English language.
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